Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series Book 3) Read online

  Between a Rock and a Hard Place is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2015 Alibi eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2015 by Marty Wingate

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 9780804177726

  Cover design: Scott Biel

  Cover images: (bridge) Danita Delmont/Gallo Images/Getty Images; (hat) Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Images; (cat) Susan Schmitz/Shutterstock

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Acknowledgments

  By Marty Wingate

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Three boys in school uniforms, their ties askew now at the end of the day, edged their way over the imaginary line drawn on the pavement by the police constable. “Stay there,” the PC had said only minutes before as he pointed to an invisible spot on the ground. “Don’t come any closer to the bridge.” The boys, none of them more than ten years old, did as they were told.

  It was a stone bridge only ten feet above the Water of Leith— not the Forth Road Bridge that connected Edinburgh to the north of Scotland—but it wasn’t the bridge that concerned the PC, it was the soaked corpse that the boys had pulled out of the shallow water.

  The PC watched as Detective Sergeant Tamsin Duncan climbed the steps up from the bank below, all the while furiously chewing on her piece of nicotine gum. The gray stones of the bridge matched the bleak sky—a dreich day, he had said to his sergeant when they arrived on the scene, and she had nodded in return.

  The boys had stumbled upon the man’s body lying facedown in the water. The ambulance workers, first on the scene, had given way to police forensic specialists. The boys now jostled for a closer look and hoped to claim credit for the discovery. They’d not stopped asking questions since the police arrived.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “I knew he was dead, I saw him first.”

  “Is there blood? Can we see?”

  “Wheesht!” the PC hissed at them.

  The boys did as they were told and fell silent, except for the littlest one who was bold enough to complain, “You sound like my granny.”

  “It’s your granny we’re waiting for,” Duncan said, “so that she can take you all home.”

  Across the road, an older woman sat stiffly upright on a stone bench, cup of tea in hand. “That isn’t their granny, is it?” Duncan asked the PC.

  “No, that woman is the one who came across the body first, actually, but the boys were just after her. Someone helped her ring us, and a neighbor gave her tea, and she’s been waiting for us since. She was quite shaken at first, kept saying she was looking for something she lost. As soon as we arrived, we diverted the rest of the schoolchildren, made them walk up to Saxe Coburg and down Hamilton Place.” His eyes shifted back to the body. “How does it look?”

  “Head trauma—we’ll take a close look at the steps—could be he slipped. That’s all we have at the moment—so, we’d better get to it.”

  The boys had started to squirm again. “Right now, lads,” the PC said, “it’s ice creams for you if you can hold still until your granny arrives.”

  Damson Hill Manor Farm House Gardens

  2 Tumbly Hill Road

  nr Quedgeley, Cheltenham

  Gloucestershire

  GL2 5DH

  25 September

  Primrose House

  Dear Ms. Parke,

  On behalf of the board, I would like to extend to you an invitation to talk with us at your earliest opportunity about the post of head gardener at Damson Hill Manor Farm House Gardens. Your knowledge of garden history in the UK, and particularly your recent work in Sussex on the Humphry Repton landscape, as well as your deep interest, expressed to us last year, in the Arts & Crafts movement and William Morris’s influence on garden design in the Cotswolds, lead us to believe you would be ideal for this post.

  We hope you will ring us on (0204) 559078 just as soon as possible so that we can set up a time to meet with you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Lionel F. Arbuthnott, director

  Damson Hill Manor Farm House Gardens Charitable Trust

  LFA/sar

  Halstead House

  12 The Vicarage

  Long Melford, Sudbury

  Suffolk

  CO10 9JL

  27 January

  Primrose House

  Dear Ms. Parke,

  On behalf of the garden committee, I would like to invite you to talk with us concerning the post of head gardener of Halstead House. Last year, you shared with us your ideas for incorporating both Saxon and Viking elements in the garden to echo Suffolk’s ancient history. I write to say that we would appreciate discussing this aspect of the garden further, knowing that your qualifications and ideas would be most suitable to our long-range goals for the estate.

  We hope that your future endeavours will include Halstead House. Please ring us on (0334) 679112 at your earliest convenience.

  Yours sincerely,

  Marietta Woods-Russell, chair

  Halstead House

  MWR/lmw

  Chapter 1

  Pru watched Christopher watch the boats. He stood at one of the tall windows, steam rising from the mug of tea he held up to his face. When he noticed that she’d walked in from the bedroom, he smiled, reached down to the table for her mug, and handed it to her before slipping his arm around her waist and kissing her temple. They kept their silent vigil until the flotilla of fishing boats—looking like little windup toys from this vantage point, with puffs of white sea foam at their stern—vanished from sight over the horizon.

  Just as their idyll had vanished before her eyes. Now a note of frustrated melancholy had taken the place of freedom. Six months’ leave he’d had—where had the time gone? When she’d left her head-gardener post at Primrose House,
and Christopher had taken a leave from his job as detective chief inspector with London’s Metropolitan Police, the world had been theirs. Although they’d never left the shores of England, they had traveled through each other’s lives, growing accustomed to the other’s daily routines and finding new routines together. It had been the most pleasant interlude she could imagine.

  They’d not been idle, but had occupied themselves with a variety of volunteer tasks, bouncing around the country as they did so. In Hastings, at the tourist office where Pru’s niece Peppy worked, they refilled racks of leaflets on topics ranging from the 1066 Norman invasion to World War II. Pru had helped with several Badger Care projects—an organization near and dear to Christopher’s heart—and worked the booth at a country fête in the Cotswolds. It was the same place that Pru and Christopher had first appeared on each other’s radar, so to speak, the year before, so the weekend was more about romance than badgers.

  Christmas with the Wilsons and Pru’s brother, Simon Parke, and family. Neither Texas-born Pru nor England-born Simon had known the other existed until barely a year ago. The word “surprise” didn’t come close to their reactions—Pru in her early fifties and Simon in his mid-sixties. A freshly discovered sibling increased her family fourfold—counting her sister-in-law and two nieces. At dinner, Simon had stood, glass in hand, and said, “I don’t usually do a Christmas toast, but I want to say that we’re very happy you’re all here to celebrate with us”—he looked at Pru and Christopher—“and well…I give you family.” Everyone raised a glass and repeated the toast—“Family!”—except for Pru, who raised her glass but was unable to speak as tears streamed down her face.

  She had arrived in England two years earlier with no actual family to speak of, but had made her own—in London, her friend Jo Howard and, by extension, Jo’s daughter, Cordelia, Dele’s partner, Lucy, and now baby Oliver. Harry and Vernona Wilson, clients in London, had moved back to their Hampshire home, Greenoak. Simon was the Wilsons’ gardener, which strengthened those ties. And there was Christopher, of course. In Sussex, she’d added Ivy Fox and son, Robbie, along with a few others. To her, they were each one family, and Pru held on to family fiercely, whether they be blood or not.

  —

  She and Christopher had spent part of the winter occupying a small National Trust property near Greystoke in Cumbria, filling a vacancy until the next, long-term leaseholders took over—a snowy January that kept them indoors and by the fire. The last few weeks they had taken up residence in a holiday flat in a small village on the south coast of Cornwall, where they walked short stretches of the coastal path when it wasn’t pouring rain. Christopher focused on teaching Pru to identify the seabirds, but her guesses were erratic. “Is it a tern? Arctic? Sandwich? Common?”—terns were her fallback guess, as there were only a few from which to choose; if it was a gull, she was lost. He knew the countryside too well, and she found it difficult to catch him out on the native plant landscape.

  As their six months together drew to a close, Pru thought of Christopher back to his job in Chelsea and Pru to…what? If only those letters would stop, perhaps she could think clearly enough to make a decision. She had spent her first year in England, fresh from Texas, in search of a head-gardener post while filling her days with maintenance work in London—cutting grass, weeding, planting pots of annuals. No one had wanted to hire her until at last Davina and Bryan Templeton took her on to restore a historic Humphry Repton garden near Royal Tunbridge Wells. A murder notwithstanding, it had gone well enough to draw the attention of the gardening world—and now the gardens that had once rejected her were begging her to work for them.

  “What about this one?” Christopher picked up the latest offer from an ever-growing stack on the coffee table.

  She kissed him and took the letter from Sir Frank Chesterton Victorian Gardens and Grottoes. “I don’t want to live in Shropshire,” she explained—and not for the first time. Christopher seemed determined that she consider each offer no matter how far apart it put them. He kept telling her that he wanted to be fair, not assume too much.

  “You don’t want to give up gardening, do you?”

  “No,” she said, “but my priorities have shifted.” She raised her eyebrows and held his gaze until he smiled in acknowledgment and squeezed her hand. She would have to work; she knew that. And he would have to work—they couldn’t be vagabonds the rest of their lives. They’d settled into this life together with little talk of the future, because Christopher said he didn’t want to hold her back, but now the future breathed down their necks. “You’re not trying to get rid of me, are you?” she asked.

  She was just joking, but his response was to take her in his arms and bury his face in her hair. “I want you with me always,” he whispered.

  They had been about to head out the door to the pub, but that could wait.

  —

  “Could you please make a job come open at Chiswick House?” she asked, lying on her side in bed, head propped up in her hand. That would be quite near his flat.

  “As if they’d listen to me.” And the conversation wandered off into discussing one more visit to family and friends in the south on their way back to London.

  As much as Christopher had thrown himself into this gap, in reality, she knew he looked forward to getting back to police work. She could see it on his face and in the absentminded way he replied to simple questions—whether he wanted tea or coffee, digestive or gingernut biscuit. She caught him in pensive moods, staring out the window that faced the sea or stirring his coffee until it was too cold to drink. Yes, he wanted to get back to work, and if Pru could find something to do—even for a while—she thought that he would feel better about wanting it.

  —

  “This one,” she said one afternoon. For the past several months, Pru’s letters had been forwarded to Jo in London, who sent a packet off to Pru every few days—letters full of offers to discuss the head-gardener position at what now seemed like far-flung corners of the country. Pru left the ever-growing stack on the coffee table and read and reread them, but none had any appeal to her. Except for a letter that had arrived two days ago, in the latest batch. As she shuffled through pleas from Boars Hall Castle in Durham and Stonechat Gardens in Dorset, a letter from Scotland kept rising to the surface.

  Pru held up the letter for Christopher to see. “I’m going to take this one.”

  Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

  Stockbridge

  Edinburgh, Scotland

  1 February

  Primrose House

  Dear Ms. Parke,

  RBGE is both an educational and public institution involved in research as well as outreach.

  We would like to discuss with you the possibility of your participation in a project that would include identifying and cataloguing documents recently recovered and in our temporary possession. These may or may not have been written by eighteenth-century plant explorer Archibald Menzies. We feel confident that you are aware of the contributions Menzies made to RBGE and the Royal Society, and will be as enthusiastic about this endeavour as we are to have you join us.

  We want to be clear that this appointment would be for a three-month period only, to begin as soon as you are able to commit. Please contact us at your earliest convenience by phoning me on (0887) 5567221.

  Yours sincerely,

  Alastair R. Campbell

  Director of Special Projects

  RBGE

  “A research project—I would probably end up writing a paper for a well-respected journal. Who knows what kind of job I could get after that? I know it’s far away from London, but it would be only temporary. And I wouldn’t be working seven days a week. We could have a few weekends together. And after that”—she took his hand—“I’m moving to London. I’m afraid you’ll just have to put up with me.”

  “You could make quite a name for yourself with this, couldn’t you?” They sat on the sofa, and he read the letter. “Who is Archibald Menzies?”
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  “He’s a hugely important eighteenth-century plant hunter,” Pru said. For a moment, she saw herself presenting her paper at the next international botanical garden conference: “The Botany of History: Archibald Menzies Rediscovered.” She blushed at her own nerve and squeezed Christopher’s hand to ground herself. “He was Scottish. Well”—she shrugged—“those plant hunters were almost all Scots. And he traveled all over the world.” Too vague, she thought, and searched her memory for more detail. “He collected plants up and down the western coast of the US.” She drew her brows together. “I don’t seem to remember as much about him as some of the others. The plant hunters were such adventurers. George Forrest was lost in the Himalayas for weeks without shoes. Ernest Wilson came back from China with a broken leg that never healed correctly—he called it his ‘lily limp,’ because he’d been after the regal lily. David Douglas fell into a pit in Hawaii and was run through by a wild boar—supposedly an accident, but there have always been rumors. Menzies…” She ran her hand over the paper, hoping to absorb an anecdote. “Oh, wait. He’s the monkey puzzle man. He brought back seeds of that tree from Chile.” She looked down at the letter. “I haven’t really put myself out there as an expert on plant explorers,” she said. “And I never applied for a post in Edinburgh. I wonder why they thought of me.”

  “They know your reputation,” Christopher pointed out.

  Pru pursed her lips. “You mean they saw my name in the papers. Well, I can read up on him in London before I head north.”